John Graves Quotations

I think we're moving toward that as the norm.

Most of the employees treat us with respect, but I give respect. That's why I get respect.

We are in a box without a lot of options. You wouldn't put an addition on your house if you lost your job.

We don't believe that we violated the law. However, it was, we feel, a prudent decision to resolve the matter and move on.

His biological reality, his eye for things most people don't see with fish, is what really sets him apart. His talks, and especially the video he'll show, will blow you away.

I would be annoyed if I were any more in tune with modern sensibilities. I was shaped differently. The world in which I grew up was Texan and Southern, and it had many, many failings. I think I've gotten rid of most of the bad things in myself from that earlier age, but I don't adjust to the way things are progressing now.

You notice. And noticing, you live.

If you are lucky and reverent, and hush for a moment the doubts in your head, sometimes God will whisper in your ear.

Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things--sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains. . . . Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited.

Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day's lazy work, but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind. You are not in a hurry there; you learned long since not to be.